Students from the MA New Media (UvA), MA Information Science (UvA) and MA Editorial Design (MaHKU) presented their interactive visualization projects at Crea.

Introduction by Yuri Engelhardt

The Visualizing our World of Data program contained eight presentations (not all of them are described here), many of which were based on Flickr. One of the requirements of the assignment was to gather a suitable dataset within a week, which led many students to opt for the easy to use Flickr photos/API.

WorldMinder

WorldMinder was inspired by GapMinder and contains public awareness data. When mapping world data you need an orientation point and a graph is not suitable for that purpose. Instead, data is mapped onto a world map. It is supplemented with a scatter chart and the main interface view shows three sets of data in one single visualization.

The application has several functions:

• As you can see the color of the dots is consistent with the map which makes it easy to locate the plotted data on the map.
• The red/green colors indicate whether or not the number is below or above the average. You can switch between green/red, for example in the case of HIV you would want a number that is above average colored in red as an alarming color.
• In the bar chart you can compare countries.
• In the x and y-axis you can chart different data, you can create your own view.

WorldMinder is a framework for visualizing datasets and for posing new questions. You can map and chart different datasets and pose new questions through combinations. It is meant as a framework and hopefully in the future it would allow you to import your own datasets and map/visualize them. In the current version you can use it to link different types of visualizations and as a framework for posing questions. What is interesting in this application is that there are “dataless” countries. There is no way to see “non-data” in a scatter chart. WorldMinder also shows you which countries have no available data.

On a technical note, WorldMinder used PHP to retrieve the data, Flash to visualize the data and it’s all stacked in layers using JavaScript. JQuery was used for the interaction between the different displays.

WorldMinder works fine with: Safari 4.0 beta & Firefox Mac/Linux.

Political Discourse Bubbles

This project reminded me  of the ‘US presidential speeches tag cloud’ by Chirag Mehta. The main difference is that it shows all the political parties in the Netherlands and words frequently used in their party programs in order to show their political discourse.

Political Discourse Bubbles

One of the most interesting uses of this project is the feature to map a discourse over time. How has a party program changed and which issues lose or gain attention from political parties? On a small critical note I would like to point out that there is quite some noise in the early periods. The old Dutch way of spelling “the” “and” and all these small words that are filtered out in the tagclouds do appear in the early periods with their old spelling.

New Media Events

New Media Events (Firefox and widescreen only) shows you pictures taken during so called new media events such as The Next Web and the Web 2.0 expo. The team described the application as a way of socializing but I don’t socialize with other new media event visitors through such applications. There are plenty of existing platforms that allow for direct interaction and the sharing of pictures such as Twitter in combination with Twitpic or Mobypicture.

Currently it is a New Media Events calendar which may serve as an archive. New media events are added by the team itself and photos will only appear if tagged appropriately.

Global Party Viewer

The Global Party Viewer aims to visualize events occuring in a specific place in the world on a specific time using Flickr images and their metadata. The application distinguishes between different types of music (rock, classical, techno) but is able to map events with different music types onto the same location by creating an overlap. The GPV is based on the premise of: the more popular the party, the more pictures are shown. With the increase in camera phones and GPS that provide location aware pictures such visualizations will be come richer and richer.

Global Party Viewer

It would be interesting to coorporate with event planners that integrate Flickr pictures such as Upcoming.org which provides specific event tags that may be used by Flickr users.

Shotspot

ShotSpot shows you places worth a visit through the lens of Flickr. It maps specific Flick images (eg: tagged with ‘bike’ – it currently only takes English tags) and places them on the map if the user has geolocated the image. As a visitor, or tourist, where do you go if you want to see a lot of windmills? It also maps the number of pictures taken from a specific object over time which allows for questions: Where do I go in February to see beautiful waterfalls?

Unfortunately using pictures taken at a specific time as a measure for a popular destination disregards the fact that people with jobs usually go on holidays in December or July-August which will cause a rise in the number of pictures. ShotSpot does look at the unique number of visitors for a specific destination and not at the amount of pictures a user uploads during that time.

Another interesting measure for popularity would be Flickr’s own interestingness. Interestingness is based on the number of views and the number of comments. As noted by Prof. Roger Rogers another interesting Flickr specific feature to look at would whether or not the user has a pro account.

ShotSpot (Windows Only/Firefox or Chrome browser – Also works on my Mac with Firefox)
http://www.ronkok.com/work/infvis/pub/

Other projects
PhotoTrail, Zoom into the Zoo, World through my Eyes and “A Tag’s Life” by Daan Odijk.

A tag's life

Previous projects
Two blog postings about last year’s projects / presentations:
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/05/22/visualizing-the-network/
http://www.latebytes.nl/archives/2008/05/een-gevisualise.html

Audience

Photos by Ork de Rooij.

When: Thursday 14 May 2009, 15:00-17:45 o’clock
Where: CREA Theater, Turfdraagsterpad 17, Amsterdam, http://crea.uva.nl
Entrance: free

In a unique cooperation of three master programs, students have developed eight interactive visualization projects. Graphic designers from the Utrecht Graduate School of Art and Design, media analysts from the Faculty of Humanities and computer scientists from the Science Faculty of the University of Amsterdam have spent the last three months working together in multidisciplinary teams. Based on large collections of Flickr photographs, political party programs, and global statistical data, visualization tools have been developed that enable surprising discoveries about the world we live in.

This event is organized by: MA New Media (UvA), MA Information Science (UvA), and MA Editorial Design (MaHKU). Supported by: MultimediaN & CREA.

Last week I gave a presentation on social secrets of the web and their privacy issues for the Social Secrets Graduation Workshop at the University of Applied Science/HvA. The presentation (in Dutch) was filmed and can be viewed online at the Social Secrets website or in low-res below:

Anne Helmond from Socialsecrets on Vimeo.

The slides are in English and are online at Slideshare.

Photo by Social Secrets

Today, during the New Media course for the first year students at the University of Amsterdam we discussed ‘Citizen Journalism’ (Flew 2008) and ‘From Blogs to Open News: Notes towards a Taxonomy of P2P Publications.’ (Bruns 2003). Concepts such as gatewatching, gatekeeping and open news were central to their assignment.

I asked them to look at the online news models presented by Bruns (2003) and Deuze (2003) to use as a starting point to create their own online news models. They had to try and place the following news sites in their own models:

• http://geenstijl.nl/
• http://buurtlink.nl/
• http://nujij.nl/
• http://news.google.nl/
• http://blufftontoday.com/

It proved to be a very effective and efficient method to discuss the characteristics of each of the news sites.

Life has been busy lately!

Jasmin flower tea

I started teaching four groups of Introduction New Media for the second year and three groups of Academic Research. As of March 17 I will also be teaching at The Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences (HvA) at the Interactive Media department.

So, while I’m also looking for a new apartment in Amsterdam and planning a writing scheduled for the Networked book, blogging might be irregular. Maybe I’ll start writing shorter pieces, or move my main activity to Twitter, I haven’t decided yet.

I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog for a while now but I can never find the time to complete it. So stay tuned, I hope to find a new blogging rhythm within a month.

Rev. Edupunk photo by umwdtlt.

During the holidays I was catching up on reading old Wireds and a word in the Jargon Watch caught my attention:

Edupunk n. Avoiding mainstream teaching tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard, edupunks bring the rebellious attitude and DIY ethos of ’70s bands like the Clash to the classroom.

The term edupunk was coined by Jim Groom and there’s even a somewhat out-of-date aggregated site dedicated to the edupunk.

Since I started teaching I have disliked Blackboard with its unfriendly user interface. It’s clunky, ugly, gray, closed and supposedly extremely expensive. Unfortunately I have to work with Blackboard with the first year students because the first year courses are attended by 400 people which all have to hand in the same assignments. I must admit edupunks would have a hard time with grading and supervising over 100 students.

But at heart I am an edupunk. I prefer to have my students blog their assignments, or send a link to whatever form their assignment may have. On top of that, as a teacher, I would prefer a blog as well. It’s easier to maintain, the usability is much better and it allows for feedback from the outside. Of course there is the downside of spam but it weighs up against the disadvantages of Blackboard.

Another aspect of me as an edupunk is the fact that I am not a big fan of Powerpoint. It has become a noun. Thus, during our last New Media team meeting we decided not to ask the students to do a Powerpoint presentation but instead make them aware that there are other formats or forms they can use to deliver a slideshow presentation. Keynote, OpenOffice, PDF, HTML, an image slideshow. Anything. A presentation does not equal Powerpoint.